拍品 60
60
A Haniwa Figure of a Woman
A Haniwa Figure of a Woman
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Some Reflections on the Post-War London CollectorsVictor Harris, Keeper Emeritus of Japanese Antiquities, The British Museum.Post-war London was a playground for collectors of Japanese art since the many collections both great and small which had been amassed during and after the Meiji period up to the 1930s were released onto the market. But in a spirit of reconciliation at the time for which Britain should feel justifiably proud, the government supported the acquisition of important Japanese antiquities by the British Museum. This deliberate policy of extending the hand of friendship through the promotion of cultural understanding has proved its worth in rebuilding the pre-war ties of friendship which had existed between Japan and the West.Among the more striking antiquities bought for the museum with the National Art Collections fund were large Heian period wood sculptures of the deities Kichijoten and Fudo Myo-o, a standing lacquered wood Kamakura period figure of Amida Nyorai made by the yosegi-zukuri [ joined wood] method with the realistic crystal eyes, and a massive Kamakura period wood head of Buddha.The same spirit infused many ex-military and diplomatic personnel, among whom Sir Harry Garner (1891 - 1977) and Lady Garner were prominent. He is known for his scholarly works on Chinese ceramics and cloisonné, and for his service as Secretary to the Oriental Ceramics Society (1951 - 1967) and President from 1967 to 1971. The Garners gave many fine pieces of Japanese lacquer to the British Museum several of which have since been exhibited in Japan. The magnificent pair of Kakiemon elephants having been on long-term loan to the museum since Sir Harry’s death were finally acquired in 1980.In every second-hand furniture shop at the time there were Japanese swords to be had together with walking sticks in umbrella stands, and trestle tables in the Portobello Road market groaned under the weight of piles of pristine colour prints by Kunisada and others. Fine art objects which had been bought for high prices in the early decades of the 20th century were going for a song, and the auction rooms were inundated with high quality Meiji export pieces that had become out of fashion. A grand time for the perceptive collector indeed!In the forefront was one Anne Hull Grundy (1926 - 1984) whose family had left Germany when Hitler rose to power and settled in Northampton where her industrialist father brought his metal toys company. During the War he made munitions, and after the war he introduced the Corgi model toys to further the fortune his family had built up in Germany. Anne inherited income from the company and from the Keyser-Ullman bank, so was able to build up one of the finest collections of jewellery. She became bed-bound in her twenties, but continued to collect jewellery and Japanese art together with her husband Professor John Hull Grundy. Anne was not averse to buying, selling and exchanging in order to acquire what she wanted, and made detailed notes on every transaction. Her most important collection was of European jewellery, but she also loved Japanese netsuke and inro which she catalogued immaculately. John and Anne both loved Martinware ceramics, and this together with John’s collection of medallions, a great amount of Anne’s jewellery and her Japanese collection were given and bequeathed to the British Museum. Many other institutions also benefitted from the couple’s generosity.Like many great collectors Anne had a deep knowledge of her subjects, but there were few of her generation who could match the scholarship of Jack Hillier, collector of Japanese prints and paintings. Jack Hillier (1912 -1995) had admired Japanese colour prints and printed books since his youth, and now returned demobbed from the North African desert to find the broadest conceivable variety of Japanese art available and before him. He built up a huge collection and devoted himself to a lifelong study of Japanese paintings, their schools and artists, so that even with no relevant academic qualifications he became one of the few non-Japanese who were able to read the cursive script of Hokusai. He was a consultant cataloguer for Sotheby’s for twenty-five years during which time he advised and helped many young collectors and was instrumental in the growth of several great collections like those of Henri Vever, Ralph Harari and Sir Alfred Chester Beatty whose collection he bequeathed to Eire and which may be seen in the Chester Beatty Library in the grounds of Dublin Castle. Hillier sold his Nanga and Shijo school paintings to the Ashmolean Museum and his collection of some six hundred printed books to the British Museum, both collections for not immodest sums. His work was acknowledged by the Japanese government in decorating him with the Order of the Rising Sun with Gold Rays and Rosette. University academics, museum curators, amateur collectors, and dealers alike met and socialised at the markets and art auctions, and Jack was on easy terms with everyone who met him. His impressive list of publications includes work on the catalogue of the Khalili Collection on which he corroborated with the late Dr Oliver Impey, Assistant Keeper of Japanese Art at the Ashmolean Museum. Impey (1936 - 2005) was educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford where he studied Zoology. After a period in the Coldstream Guards he too became drawn to art and went to work for Sotheby’s during which time he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis on the workings of the lizard’s jaw. In 1967 he went to the Ashmolean and spent the next decades working on and expanding the Japanese collections and went on to raise funds for a new Japanese Decorative Arts Gallery. Impey was a museum man through and through, yet he was a private collector in his own right of such objects which would not have been right for the museum. So he collected pieces which were imperfect, and at the same time bought such objects on the grounds that they were unmistakable examples and could be displayed with the perfect face only visible in an exhibition. He was passionately interested in Japanese porcelain and lacquer-ware, becoming an international authority on both, especially on early 16th-17th century export lacquer on which he wrote and co-authored a number of milestone works. Impey was one of the post-war generation of collector-curators who was always kind and helpful to youngsters, and was foremost in promoting the up and coming generations of specialists in the field. Among his many scholarly works was Early Porcelain Kilns of Arita (1996) based on fieldwork at old kiln sites in Arita, Japan. For he collected avidly with scant, although measured care for the condition of the object so long as the price was right. He inspired a whole generation of scholars and specialists, both contemporary and younger. He was a prominent and frequent presence in the meetings of the Oriental Ceramics Society, as a curator of the univesity’s botanical garden, and an organiser of several major exhibitions such as the Great Japan Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1981.Dr Impey was to the Ashmolean perhaps what Soame Jenyns was to the British Museum, both having collected avidly for their respective institutions, and both having travelled to the tiger’s den and excavated kiln sites in Arita at first hand. Roger Soame Jenyns (1904 - 1976), like Impey an Eton boy, had worked briefly in Hong Kong in the civil service, and joined the Department of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum from 1931 to 1968 to become Deputy Keeper of the department. Like Sir Authur Woolaston Franks before him, Soame Jenyns looked for the Japanese taste in Japanese ceramics, and was able to add to the Museum’s collection particularly in that field. His two books simply entitled Japanese Pottery and Japanese Porcelain, remain the most formidable works on the subject in the English language, and illustrate fine pieces from his own collection now found in the British Museum and other permanent collections including the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.There were several major collectors of Japanese arms and armour among whom Sir Frank Bowden (1909 - 2001) has pride of place. Sir Frank inherited the baronetcy upon the death of his father in 1960. Together with his grandfather’s collection of arms he added to the collection enthusiastically over several decades following the war. He kept the swords, polearms, and sets of armour in a permanent display in a long armoury in the family house, Thame Park, a Palladian mansion built as frontage to a centuries old Cistercian monastery. Sir Frank had been a keen Naval Reservist and served in the Royal Navy during the War. From 1960 his inheritance allowed him to indulge his hobby, and he became a regular face at auctions. One of his joys was to seek out bargains in out of the way places, but he would also pay large sums for fine examples, and paid a then record auction price for a finely mounted thirteenth century sword made by the Ichimonji school. Among his hobbies were winter sports and sailing, but he delighted in his unusual pet, a cheetah, which he would take into Oxford in his car, the cheetah in the passenger seat. He was always welcoming to visitors and enjoyed showing them round his armoury. He served as President of both The Japan Society and The British Kendo Association, and was deservedly awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese Government.Sir Frank befriended a fellow collector, Denys Bower (1905 - 1977), who built up a great collection of Egyptian, Buddhist, Jacobean, and Japanese arms and lacquer. But whereas Sir Frank had inherited the Raleigh Bicycle company fortune with which to buy his beloved swords, Denys inherited only the passion for collecting from his father. Denys wrote in a note entitled ‘Childhood Collecting Preferences’ “There must be no more of this silly sword business, said my grandfather to my father in about 1895.” But grandfather evidently relented and Denys’s father made a collection of swords of many nations to which Denys and his younger brother Alban had free access. The two young boys having discovered that Japanese swords were the sharpest of all took to wearing them and roaming the streets freely armed with the fearsome weapons, rejecting the wooden swords a kindly policeman had made for them. Denys became a bank clerk, and despite his poor means was strangely able to buy fine antiquities. He left the bank to establish an Oriental gallery in Baker Street, and lived in Portman Square where he kept his growing collection. Forced out of home and gallery by developers he persuaded his bank to lend him ￡6,000 to buy Chiddingstone castle in Kent, in which to keep his collection. Denys was a charming man, and he was always unabashed at running up debts in order to buy what he wanted on the grounds that something would come along - and it always did. He fell in love with a young woman who claimed falsely to be a widow of the Comte d’Estainville of Monaco, and when she shortly later rejected him he faced her with a revolver threatening suicide. Shots were fired, Denys claimed that he had accidentally shot the girl and then tried to kill himself. He survived and so did she, and Denys was imprisoned for life. But he found ways to continue with his collecting even from his cell in Wormwood Scrubs, and was eventually freed on appeal through the efforts of his solicitor. He wrote to Sir Frank Bowden from the Scrubs in a long letter about the antique market in which he wrote “I’m not a bad man Frank, just a bad shot”. The castle remains open to visitors, boasting a Japanese collection of around a dozen armours, seventy or so swords, netsuke, inro, fine quality lacquer, articulated iron animals, and haniwa of the Old Tombs period. An eccentric, and inspired collector, and a benefactor to us all. Swords and lacquer were the special love of probably the most passionate dealer and collector of them all, Michael Dean who became an inspiration to so many collectors.A major aspect of the work of the curators in our national and private museums is the conservation, preservation and acquisition of objects to improve and broaden the scope of the collections. As Impey and Jenyns did this for ceramics and lacquer collections, so the two friends Basil William Robinson (1912 - 2005) and Henry Russell Robinson (1920 - 1978) did for the collections of Japanese Armour in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Armouries in the Tower of London respectively. Russell Robinson bequeathed his favourite Japanese helmet to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and gave of his own collection freely to the Tower. Basil Robinson, or ‘Robbie’ as he was known to everyone, wrote on Islamic metalwork, Japanese swords, and colour prints. He was since his youth captivated by the late Edo period colour prints and had collected a great number in fine condition, particularly the work of Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Among his several landmark publications he certainly popularised the whole subject of the samurai ethic with The Arts of the Japanese Sword (London 1961), and Kuniyoshi: the Warrior Prints (Oxford, 1982). Robinson was extraordinarily kind to everyone who visited him in his post as Keeper of Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, when he would patiently explain the significance of the characteristics of their Japanese sword and translate for them the inscriptions of the maker’s name on the tang hidden within the hilt. Who can forget the delightful exhibition of colour prints ‘Kuniyoshi’s Cats’ which BW displayed in his local church where he was a keen chorister.Among collectors Sir Robert Sainsbury (1906 - 2000) and his wife Lisa Lady Sainsbury (1912 - 2014) were a rare example of a married couple who were equally passionately involved in the world of art. Despite his busy career, having worked in the family business Sainsbury’s since 1930 to become joint president forty years later, Sir Robert worked ceaselessly for social justice after the war, to become instrumental in the establishment of the Welfare State. Of all the beneficent activities of the Sainsbury family, Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury went a step further in when they endowed the University of East Anglia with the centre for Japanese Studies (SISJAC) in Norwich, and built the Sainsbury Centre on the university campus to house and display their life’s collection of antiquities, tribal art, paintings, and roughly 140 Japanese objects of the total collection of 1300. The couple had always been of an independent mind in their joint collecting, and famously supported artists like Sir Francis Bacon when his work was otherwise unknown and unloved. Sir Robert wrote in ‘The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts’ that his criterion for collecting was nothing more than that he liked an object, and Lady Sainsbury was of like strong mind. When asked what he was looking for he would reply “I am not looking for anything” no doubt confounding art dealers who hoped to sell to him. He wrote about his sensual enjoyment of art, and that they endowed the University of East Anglia because “…we want to give them the opportunity of looking at works of art in the natural context of their work and daily life, not just because they have been prompted to visit a museum or art gallery...”Lady Sainsbury became very keen on Japanese art and bought more than a hundred pieces, not to make a comprehensive study collection, but because she liked them. The result is that the Japanese material stands out as a great study collection. There is archaeological material from Japan’s pre-history, such as earthenware haniwa (see lots 60 and 61), ceramics, paintings both secular and religious, lacquer including fine pieces of Negoro ware (see lots 72-77), and both Shinto and Buddhist devotional works, including a fine 13th century figure of the Buddha Amida (UEA 281).On long term loan to the Sainsbury Centre from Sir Hugh Cortazzi (b. 1924) is a collection of prints and maps made both in Japan and Europe dating from the 16th century onward. Sir Hugh has had a long and distinguished diplomatic and business career with four tours in Tokyo from 1951 onward culminating in his being Ambassador to Japan between 1980 and 1984. He was President of the Japan Society from 1984 to 1994, and is a world acknowledged scholar and specialist in Japanese cultural matters. He has written copiously on a wide variety of subjects, among which his scholarly Isles of Gold: Antique Maps of Japan (London, 1983) reflects one of his great passions, a unique collection of antique maps of Japan from earliest times. Sir Hugh was honoured as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1984, and with the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure, Grand Cordon in 1995.The Property of an American Collector
A Haniwa Figure of a Woman

Kofun period (5th-6th century)

細節
A Haniwa Figure of a Woman
Kofun period (5th-6th century)
Of low-fired reddish clay, modelled as the torso of a woman, her hair tied up with a headdress, earrings, a necklace and two ribbons to the neck and waist, the right hand held to the waist, the left arm missing, the figure standing with a conical skirt
62cm. high

榮譽呈獻

Anastasia von Seibold
Anastasia von Seibold
+44 (0)20 7752 3127

拍品專文

The result of the Oxford Authentication Ltd. Thermoluminescence test no. N115j84 is consistent with the dating of this lot.

For similar examples, see:
Miki Fumio ed., Haniwa no utsukushisa [Beauty of Haniwa], Asahi photo book vol. 28, (Tokyo, 1956), p. 21, 30 and 31.


Haniwa (literally ‘planted rings’), date from the period of great tombs, the Kofun period (3rd to 7th centuries AD). The earliest examples are terracotta cylinders, often with simple circumferential rings as decoration pierced with two opposed holes by which it is believed they would have been joined together in rings. They were originally used to stabilise the contours of the burial mounds. Professor William Gowland (1842-1927), was to show that the key-hole shaped Konabe Kofun in Nara prefecture, of length 204 metres, must have originally had some 4,740 cylindrical haniwa embedded in the tiers of raised ground1.

Later tombs have haniwa in the form of animals, tools, houses, and human beings. Some were clearly arranged as part of a ceremonial display, probably resurrected periodically before the tomb. The present female haniwa very likely represents a Shinto maiden, or shaman, who would have been present in living form at such festivals. Some such figures represent serving girls, like Gowland’s haniwa, which although now lacking arms, might have once held an offering bowl with her left hand over her breast in a gesture of fidelity. The Shinto maidens often wear necklaces of round beads with a central magatama or comma-shaped stone bead in keeping with the creation myths according to the 8th century histories the Nihon Shoki and the Nihongi. Few such figures survive wholly intact but with careful restoration they can provide a haunting glimpse into Japan’s pre-history, the spiritual awakening of the Yamato kingdom, and the emerging Imperial state of Japan.

1. V Harris and K Goto eds, William Gowland: The Father of Japanese Archaeology, (Tokyo and London, 2003) p. 174.

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